
Class ^ 

Book : 






COF^'RIGHT DEPOSIT. 



l^tlmttan Iniu^rBttg 



THE LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 
LECTURES FOR 1914-1915 



2I1|? IComa Ollark lanux^m Jouttliattott 

was established in 1913 with a bequest of $25,000 
under the will of Louis Clark Vanuxem, of the 
Class of 1879. By direction of the executors of 
Mr. Vanuxem's estate, the income of the foun- 
dation is to be used for a series of public lectures 
delivered in Princeton annually, at least one half 
of which shall be on subjects of current scientific 
interest. The lectures are to be published and 
distributed among schools and libraries generally. 



The following lectures have already been pub- 
lished or are in press: 

1912-13 The Theory of Permutable Functions, by 
Vito Volterra 

1913-14 Lectures delivered in connection with the 
dedication of the Graduate College of 
Princeton University by Emile Boutroux, 
Alois Riehl, A. D. Godley, and Arthur 
Shipley 

1914-15 Romance, by Sir Walter Raleigh 

1915-16 A Critique of the Theory of Evolu- 
tion, by Thomas Hunt Morgan 



LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 



ROMANCE 



TWO LECTURES BY 

SIR WALTER RALEIGH 

M.A., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, FELLOW OF 

MERTON COLLEGE 



LECTURES DELIVERED AT PRINCETON 
UNIVERSITY, MAY 4th AND 5th, 1915 



PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 
PRINCETON 

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1916 



A 



Copyright, 1916, by 
Princeton University Press 

Published October. 1916 



■ tl 



V'lf 



y^> 






lCI.A4 45''ii»t) 



'\x 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

The period of English poHtical history which 
falls between Pitt's acceptance of office as 
prime minister, in 1783, and the passing of the 
Reform Bill, in 1832, is a period rich in char- 
acter and event. The same period of fifty years 
is one of the most crowded epochs of our na- 
tional literature. In 1783 Wilham Blake pro- 
duced his Poetical Sketches, and George Crabbe 
published The Village. In 1832 Scott died, 
not many months after the death of Goethe. 
Between these two dates a great company of 
English writers produced a literature of im- 
mense bulk, and of almost endless diversity of 
character. Yet one dominant strain in that 
literature has commonly been allowed to give 
a name to the whole period, and it is often 
called the Age of the Romantic Revival. 

We do not name other notable periods of 
our literature in this fashion. The name itself 



3 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

contains a theory, and so marks the rise of a 
new philosophical and aesthetic criticism. It 
attempts to describe as well as to name, and 
attaches significance not to kings, or great 
authors, but to the kind of writing which flour- 
ished conspicuously in that age. A less am- 
bitious and much more secure name would have 
been the Age of George III ; but this name has 
seldom been used, perhaps because the writers 
of his time who reverenced King George III 
were not very many in nmnber. The danger 
of basing a name on a theory of literature is 
that the theory may very easily be superseded, 
or may prove to be inadequate, and then the 
name, having become immutable by the force 
of custom, is left standing, a monument of 
ancient error. The terminology of the sciences, 
which pretends to be exact and colourless, 
is always being reduced to emptiness by the 
progress of knowledge. The thing that struck 
the first observer is proved to be less important 
than he thought it. Scientific names, for all 
their air of learned universality, are merely 
fossilized impressions, stereotyped portraits of 
a single aspect. The decorous obscurity of the 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 3 

ancient languages is used to conceal an im- 
mense diversity of principle. Mammal, amphi- 
bian, coleoptera, dicotyledon, cryptogam, — all 
these terms, which, if they were translated into 
the language of a peasant, would be seen to 
record very simple observations, yet do lend a 
kind of formal majesty to ignorance. 

So it is with the vocabulary of literary criti- 
cism : the first use of a name, because the name 
was coined by someone who felt the need of it, 
is often striking and instructive ; the impression 
is fresh and new. Then the freshness wears off 
it, and the name becomes an outworn print, a 
label that serves only to recall the memory of 
past travel. What was created for the needs 
of thought becomes a thrifty device, useful only 
to save thinking. The best way to restore the 
habit of thinking is to do away with the names. 
The word Romantic loses almost all its mean- 
ing and value when it is used to characterize 
whole periods of our literature. Landor and 
Crabbe belong to a Romantic era of poetry; 
Steele and Sterne wrote prose in an age which 
set before itself the Classic ideal. Yet there 
is hardly any distinctively Classical beauty in 



4 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

English verse which cannot be exempHfied from 
the poetry of Landor and Crabbe; and there 
are not very many characteristics of Romantic 
prose which find no illustration in the writ- 
ings of Steele and Sterne. Nevertheless, the 
very name of romance has wielded such a power 
in human affairs, and has so habitually im- 
pressed the human imagination, that time is not 
misspent in exhibiting its historical bearings. 
These great vague words, invented to facilitate 
reference to whole centuries of hmiian history 
— Middle Ages, Renaissance, Protestant Re- 
formation, Revival of Romance — are very 
often invoked as if they were something ulti- 
mate, as if the names themselves were a suffi- 
cient explanation of all that they include. So 
an imperfect terminology is used to gain es- 
teem for an artificial and rigid conception of 
things which were as fluid as life itself. The 
Renaissance, for instance, in its strict original 
meaning, is the name for that renewed study of 
the classical literatures which manifested itself 
throughout the chief countries of Europe in 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 
Italy, where the movement had its origin, no 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 5 

single conspicuous event can be used to date it. 
The traditions inherited from Greece and Rome 
had never lost their authority; but with the 
increase of vi^ealth and leisure in the city re- 
publics they were renewed and strengthened. 
From being remnants and memories they be- 
came live models; Latin poetry was revived, 
and Italian poetry was disciplined by the an- 
cient masters. But the Renaissance, when it 
reached the shores of England, so far from 
giving new life to the literature it found there, 
at first degraded it. It killed the splendid 
prose school of Malory and Berners, and prose 
did not run clear again for a century. It be- 
wildered and confused the minds of poets, and 
blending itself with the national tradition, pro- 
duced the rich lawlessness of the English six- 
teenth century. It was a strong tributary to 
the stream of our national literature; but the 
popular usage, which assigns all that is good in 
the English literature of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries to a mysterious event 
called the Renaissance, is merely absurd. Mod- 
ern scholars, if they are forced to find a begin- 
ning for modern literature, would prefer to 



6 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

date it from the wonderful outburst of ver- 
nacular poetry in the latter part of the twelfth 
century, and, if they must name a birthplace, 
would claim attention for the Court of King 
Henry II. 

In some of its aspects, the Romantic revival 
may be exhibited as a natural consequence of 
the Renaissance. Classical scholarship at first 
scorned the vernacular literatures, and did all 
its work of criticism and imitation in the Latin 
tongue. By degrees the lesson was widened, 
and applied to the modern languages. Study ; 
imitation in Latin ; extension of classical usages 
and principles to modern literature, — these were 
the regular stages in the progress of the classi- 
cal influence. When the poets of France and 
England, to name no others, had learned as 
much as they were able and willing to learn 
from the masters of Greece and Rome, the 
work of the Renaissance was done. By the 
middle of the eighteenth century there was no 
notable kind of Greek or Latin literature — 
historical, philosophical, poetical; epic, elegy, 
ode, satire — which had not worthy disciples and 
rivals in the literatures of France and England. 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 7 

Nothing remained to do but to go further 
afield and seek for new masters. These might 
easily have been found among the poets and 
prophets of the East, and not a few notable 
writers of the time began to forage in that di- 
rection. But the East was too remote and 
strange, and its languages were too little 
laiown, for this attempt to be carried far; the 
imitation of Chinese and Persian models was 
practised chiefly by way of fantasy and joke. 
The study of the neglected and forgotten mat- 
ter of mediaeval times, on the other hand, was 
undertaken by serious scholars. The progress 
of the mediaeval influence reproduced very 
exactly the successive phases of the Classical 
Renaissance. At first there was study; and 
books like Sainte Palaye's Memoirs of 
Ancient Chivalry, and Paul Henri Mallet's 
Northern Antiquities, enjoyed a European 
reputation. Then followed the period of for- 
gery and imitation, the age of Ossian and 
Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop 
Percy. Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves 
in the new school, and an original literature, 
suggested by the old, was created by Sir Wal- 



8 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

ter Scott, Coleridge, and Keats. It was the 
temper of the antiquary and the sceptic, in 
the age of Gibbon and Hume, that begot the 
Romantic Revival; and the rebellion of the 
younger age against the spirit of the eight- 
eenth century was the rebellion of a child 
against its parents. 

It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to 
define Romance. In the mathematical sciences 
definitions are all-important, because with 
them the definition is the thing. When a 
mathematician asks you to describe a circle, he 
asks you to create one. But the man who asks 
you to describe a monkey is less exacting; he 
will be content if you mention some of the fea- 
tures that seem to you to distinguish a monkey 
from other animals. Such a description must 
needs be based on personal impressions and 
ideas; some features must be chosen as being 
more significant than the rest. In the history 
of literature there are only two really signifi- 
cant things — men, and books. To study the 
ascertained facts concerning men and books is 
to study biography and bibliography, two 
sciences which between them supply the only 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 9 

competent and modest part of the history of 
literature. To discern the significance of men 
and books, to classify and explain them, is an- 
other matter. We have not, and we never shall 
have, a calculus sufficient for human life even 
at its weakest and poorest. Let him who con- 
ceives high hopes from the progress of knowl- 
edge and the pertinacity of thought tame and 
subdue his pride by considering, for a moment, 
the game of chess. That game is played with 
thirty-two pieces, of six different kinds, on a 
board of sixty-four squares. Each kind of 
piece has one allotted mode of action, which is 
further cramped by severe limitations of 
space. The conditions imposed upon the game 
are strict, uniform, and mechanical. Yet those 
who have made of chess a life-long study are 
ready to confess their complete ignorance of the 
fundamental merits of particular moves; one 
game does not resemble another; and from the 
most commonplace of developments there may 
spring up, on the sudden, wild romantic possi- 
bilities and situations that are like miracles. If 
these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the 
chess-board, how shall we set a limit to the 



10 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

possibilities of human life, which is chess, with 
variety and uncertainty many million times 
increased? It is prudent, therefore, to say lit- 
tle of the laws which govern the course of hu- 
man history, to avoid, except for pastime, the 
discussion of tendencies and movements, and to 
speak chiefly of men and books. If an author 
can be exhibited as the effect of certain causes 
(and I do not deny that some authors can 
plausibly be so exhibited) he loses his virtue as 
an author. He thought of himself as a cause, 
a surprising intruder upon the routine of the 
world, an original creator. I think that he is 
right, and that the profitable study of a man 
is the study which regards him as an oddity, 
not a quiddity. 

A general statement of the law that gov- 
erns literary history may perhaps be borrowed 
from the most unreasonable of the arts — the 
art of dress. One of the powerful rulers of 
men, and therefore of books, is Fashion, and 
the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a 
great part of literary history. If the history 
of a single fashion in dress could ever be writ- 
ten, it would illuminate the literary problem. 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 11 

The motives at work are the same; thoughtful 
wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are 
all trying to do sometliing new, within the 
limits assigned by practical utility and social 
sympathy. Each desires to express himself 
and yet in that very act to win the admiration 
and liking of his fellows. The great object is 
to wear the weeds of humanity with a differ- 
ence. Some authors, it is true, like timid or lazy 
dressers, desire only to conform to usage. But 
these, as M. Brunetiere remarks in one of his 
historical essays, are precisely the authors who 
do not count. An author who respects himself 
is not content if his work is mistaken for an- 
other's, even if that other be one of the gods of 
his idolatry. He would rather write his own 
signature across faulty work than sink into a 
copyist of merit. This eternal temper of self- 
assertion, this spirit of invention, this deter- 
mination to add something or alter something, 
is no doubt the principle of life. It questions 
accepted standards, and makes of reaction 
from the reigning fashion a permanent force in 
literature. The young want something to do ; 
they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom 



13 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

where no land remains to be taken up, nor will 
they allow the praise of the dead to be the last 
word in criticism. Why should they para- 
phrase old verdicts? 

The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on 
a good author just dead, when the generation 
that discovered him and acclaimed him begins 
to pass away. Then it is not what he did that 
attracts the notice of the younger sort, but what 
he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be 
no great thinker. Pope, who, when his star 
was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new 
Poet," has to submit to examination by the 
Headmaster of Winchester, who decides that 
he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. 
Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas 
Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree 
of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly 
in clear and vigorous English, that Shakes- 
peare has no capacity for tragic writing. 
Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renais- 
sance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendu- 
lum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, 
even in the shortest of its variable oscillations, 
to revisit the greatest writers, who are nearest 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 13 

to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are 
raised by one age into the very essentials of 
good poetry, are denied the name of poetry by 
the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is 
the exploded vice of another; and Romance 
comes in and goes out with secular regularity. 
The meaning of Romance will never come 
home to him who seeks for it in modern con- 
troversies. The name Romance is itself a 
memorial of the conquest of Europe by the 
Romans. They imposed their language on 
half Europe, and profoundly influenced the 
other half. The dialectical, provincial Latin, 
of various kinds, spoken by the conquered peo- 
ples, became the Romance speech; and Ro- 
mance literature was the new literature which 
grew up among these peoples from the ninth 
century onwards, — or from an earlier time, if 
the fringe of Celtic peoples, who kept their 
language but felt the full influence of Chris- 
tianity, be taken into the account. The chief 
thing to be noted concerning Romance litera- 
ture is that it was a Christian literature, find- 
ing its background and inspiration in the ideas 
to which the Christian Church gave currency. 



14 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

While Rome spread her conquests over 
Europe, at the very heart of her empire 
Christianity took root, and by slow process 
transformed that empire. During the Middle 
Ages the Bishops of Rome sat in the seat of the 
Roman Emperors. This startling change 
possessed Gibbon's imagination, and is the 
theme of his great work. But the whole of 
Gibbon's history was anticipated and con- 
densed by Hobbes in a single sentence — "If a 
man considers the original of this great eccles- 
iastical dominion, he will easily perceive that 
the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the 
deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned 
upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy 
start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that 
heathen power." 

Here, then, is the answer to a question which 
at once suggests itself. How do we get this 
famous opposition between the older Latin lit- 
erature and the literature of those countries 
which had inherited or accepted the Latin tra- 
dition? Why did not the Romans hand over 
their literature and teach it, as they handed 
over and taught their law? They did teach it in 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 15 

their schools; grammar and rhetoric, two of 
the chief subjects of a Hberal education, were 
purely literary studies, based on the work of the 
literary masters of Rome. Never was there 
an education so completely literary as the or- 
ganized education of Rome and of her prov- 
inces. How came it that there was any breach 
between the old and the new? 

A question of this kind, involving centuries 
of history, does not admit of a perfectly simple 
answer. It may be very reasonably maintained 
that in Rome education killed literature. A 
carefully organized, universal system of educa- 
tion, which takes for its material the work of 
great poets and orators, is certain to breed a 
whole army of slaves. The teachers, employed 
by the machine to expound ideas not their own, 
soon erect systems of pedantic dogma, under 
which the living part of literature is buried. 
The experience of ancient Rome is being re- 
peated in the England of today. The officials 
responsible for education, whatever they may 
uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities 
of their work to encourage uniformity, and 
national education becomes a warehouse of 



16 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

second-hand goods, presided over by men who 
cheerfully explain the mind of Burke or of 
Shakespeare, adjusting the place of each, and 
balancing faults against merits. But Roman 
education throughout the Empire had further 
difficulties to encounter. To understand these 
it must be remembered what Latin literature 
was. The Latins, when we first discern them 
in the dim light of the past, were a small, stren- 
uous, political people, with a passion for gov- 
ernment and war. They first subdued Italy, 
and no very serious culture-problem resulted 
from that conquest. The Etruscans certainly 
contributed much to Latin civilization, but 
their separate history is lost. No one knows 
what the Etruscans thought. The Romans do 
not seem to have cared. They welded Italy to- 
gether, and thereafter came into contact with 
the older, richer civilizations of the Mediter- 
ranean shores. The chief of these, in its influ- 
ence, was the Greek civilization, as it had 
developed in that famous group of free city 
states, fostered by the sun and air, and addicted 
to life. In Athens, at the time of her glory, 
life was not a habit, but an experiment. Even 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE IT 

the conservative Romans were infected. They 
fell under the sway of Greek thought. When 
a practical man of business becomes intimate 
with an artist, he is never the same man again. 
The thought of that disinterested mode of life 
haunts his dreams. So Rome, though she had 
paid little regard to the other ancient peoples 
with whom she had had traffic and war, put 
herself to school to the Greeks. She accepted 
the Greek pantheon, renamed the Greek gods 
and goddesses, and translated and adopted 
Greek culture. The real Roman religion was 
a religion of the homestead, simple, pious, 
domestic, but they now added foreign orna- 
ments. So also with literature; their own 
native literature was scanty and practical — 
laws and rustic proverbs — but they set them- 
selves to produce a new literature, modelled on 
the Greek. Virgil followed Homer; Plautus 
copied Menander; and Roman literature took 
on that secondary and reminiscent character 
which it never lost. It was a literature of cul- 
ture, not of creed. This people had so practical 
a genius that they could put the world in har- 
ness ; for the decoration of the world they were 
willing to depend on foreign loans. 



18 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

In SO far as Latin literature was founded on 
the Greek, that is, in so far as it was a deri- 
vative and imitative Hterature, it was not very- 
fit for missionary purposes. One people can 
give to another only what is its own. The 
Greek gods were useless for export. An ex- 
ample may be taken from the English rule in 
India. We can give to the peoples of India 
our own representative institutions. We can 
give them our own authors, Shakespeare, 
Burke, Macaulay. But we cannot give them 
Homer and Virgil, who nevertheless continue 
to play an appreciable part in training the 
English mind; and we can hardly give them 
Milton, whose subtlest beauties depend on the 
niceties of the Latin speech. The trial for 
Latin literature came when obscurely, in the 
purlieus and kennels of Rome, like a hidden 
fermentation, Christianity arose. The earliest 
Christians were for the most part illiterate ; but 
when at last Christianity reached the high 
places of the government, and controlled the 
Empire, a problem of enormous difficulty pre- 
sented itself for solution. The whole elaborate 
educational svstem of the Romans was founded 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 19 

on the older literature and the older creeds. 
All education, law, and culture were pagan. 
How could the Christians be educated; and 
how, unless they were educated, could they 
appeal to the minds of educated men? So ^ 
began a long struggle, which continued for 
many centuries, and swayed this way and that. 
Was Christianity to be founded barely on the 
Gospel precepts and on a way of life, or was 
it to seek to subdue the world by yielding to 
it? This, the religious problem, is the chief 
educational problem in recorded history. There 
were the usual parties ; and the fiercest, on both 
sides, counselled no surrender. Tertullian, 
careful for the purity of the new religion, held 
it an unlawful thing for Christians to become 
teachers in the Roman schools. Later, in the 
reign of Julian the Apostate, an edict forbade 
Christians to teach in the schools, but this time 
for another reason, lest they should draw away 
the youth from the older faith. In the end the 
result was a practical compromise, arranged by 
certain ecclesiastical politicians, themselves lov- 
ers of letters, between the old world and the 
new. It was agreed, in eflPect, that the schools 



20 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

should teach humane letters and mythology, 
leaving it to the Church to teach divine doctrine 
and the conduct of life. All later history bears 
the marks of this compromise. Here was the be- 
ginning of that distinction and apportionment 
between the secular and the sacred which is so 
much more conspicuous in Christian communi- 
ties than ever it has been among the followers 
of other religions. Here also was the begin- 
ning of that strange mixture, familiar to all 
students of literature, whereby the Bible and 
Virgil are quoted as equal authorities, Plato 
is set over against St. Paul, the Sibyl confirms 
the words of David, and, when a youth of 
promise, destined for the Church, is drowned, 
St. Peter and a river-god are the chief mourn- 
ers at his poetic obsequies. This mixture is not 
a fantasy of the Renaissance ; it has been part 
and parcel, from the earliest times, of the tra- 
dition of the Christian church. 

History is larger than morality; and a wise 
man will not attempt to pass judgment on 
those who found themselves in so unparalleled 
a position. A new religion, claiming an author- 
ity not of this world, prevailed in this world, 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 21 

and was confronted with all the resources of 
civilization, inextricably entangled with the an- 
cient pagan faiths. What was to be done? 
The Gospel precepts seemed to adinit of no 
transaction. "They that say such things de- 
clare plainly that they seek a country. And 
truly, if they had been mindful of that coun- 
try from whence they came out, they might 
have had opportunity to have returned. But 
now they desire a better country, that is an 
heavenly." The material prosperity and social 
order which Law and Politics take such pains 
to preserve and increase are no part of their 
care. They are strangers and pilgrims in the 
country where they pitch their tent for a night. 
How dare they spend time on cherishing the 
painted veil called Life, when their desires are 
fixed on what it conceals? When Tacitus 
called the Christian religion "a deadly super- 
stition," he spoke as a true Roman, a member 
of the race of Empire-builders. His subtle 
political instinct scented danger from those 
who looked with coldness on the business and 
desire of this world. The Christian faith, which 
presents no social difficulties while it is pro- 



22 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

fessed here and there by a lonely saint or seer, 
is another thing when it becomes the formal 
creed of a nation. The Christians themselves 
knew that to cut themselves off from the coun- 
try of their birth would have been a fatal 
choice, so far as this world is concerned. Their 
ultimate decision was to accept Roman civiliza- 
tion and Roman culture, and to add Christian- 
ity to it. 

Then followed an age-long attempt to Chris- 
tianize Latin literature, to supply believers with 
e new poetry, written in polished and accom- 
plished verse, and inspired by Christian doc- 
trine. Of those who attempted this task, 
Prudentius is perhaps the greatest name. The 
attempt could never have been very successful ; 
those who write in Latin verse must submit to 
be judged, not by the truth of their teaching, 
but by the formal beauties of their prosody, and 
the wealth of their allusive learning. Even 
Milton, zealot though he be, is esteemed for 
his manner rather than for his matter. But the 
experiment was cut short by the barbarian in- 
vasions. When the Empire was invaded, St. 
Jerome and St. Augustine, Prudentius and 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 23 

Symmachus, Claudian and Paulinus of Nola, 
were all alive. These men, in varying degrees, 
had compounded and blended the two elements, 
the pagan and the Christian. The two have 
been compounded ever since. The famous 
sevententh century controversy concerning 
the fitness of sacred subjects for poetic treat- 
ment is but a repetition and an echo of that 
older and more vital difference. The two 
strains could never be perfectly reconciled, so 
that a certain impurity and confusion was be- 
queathed to modern European literature, not 
least to English literature. Ours is a great and 
various literature, but its rarest virtue is sim- 
plicity. Our best ballads and lyrics are filled 
with the matter of faith, but as often as we 
try the larger kinds of poetry, we inevitably 
pass over into reminiscence, learning, criticism, 
— in a word, culture. 

The barbarians seized, or were granted, land ; 
and settled down under their chiefs. They 
accepted Christianity, and made it into a war- 
like religion. They learned and "corrupted" 
the Latin language. In their dialects they had 
access neither to the literature of ancient Rome, 



24 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

nor to the imitative scholarly Christian litera- 
ture, poetry and homily, which competed with 
it. Latin continued to be the language of reli- 
gion and law. It was full of terms and allu- 
sions which meant nothing to them. They 
knew something of government, — not of the 
old republic, but of their own men and estates. 
They believed wholly and simply in Christian- 
ity, especially the miraculous part of it. To 
them (as to all whom it has most profoundly 
influenced) it was not a philosophy, but a his- 
tory of marvellous events. When, by the oper- 
ation of society, their dialect had formed itself, 
a new literature, unlike anything that had 
flourished in ancient Rome, grew up among 
them. This was Romance, the great literary 
form of the Middle Ages. It was a sincere lit- 
erature, expressive of their pride in arms and 
their simple religious faith. The early songs 
and ballads, chanted in the Romance speech, 
have all perished. From a later time there have 
come down to us the Chansons de Geste, narra- 
tive poems composed by the professional caste 
of poets to celebrate the deeds and adventures 
of the knights who fought the battles of Charle- 
magne against the Saracen invader. 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 35 

The note of this Romance literature is that 
it was actual, modern, realistic, at a time when 
classical literature had become a remote con- 
vention of bookish culture. It was sung in the 
banqueting-hall, while Latin poetry was read 
in the cells of monks. It flourished enor- 
mously-, and extended itself to all the matter of 
history and legend, to King Arthur, Theseus, 
Alexander, ancient heroes and warriors who 
were brought alive again in the likeness of 
knights and emperors. Its triumph was so 
complete, that its decadence followed swiftly. 
Like the creatures that live in the blood of man, 
literary forms and species commonly die of 
their own excess. Romances were multiplied, 
and imitated; professional poets, not content 
with marvels that had now become familiar, 
sought for a new sensation in extravagant lan- 
guage and incident. The tales became more 
and more sophisticated, elaborate, grotesque, 
and unreal, until, in the fourteenth century, a 
stout townsman, who ticketed bales in a cus- 
tom-house, and was the best English poet of his 
time, found them ridiculous. In Sir Thopas 
Chaucer parodies the popular literature of his 



26 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

day. Sir Thopas is a great reader of romances ; 
he models himself on the heroes whose deeds 
possess his imagination, and scours the English 
comitryside, seeking in vain for the fulfilment 
of his dreams of prowess. 

So Romance declined; and by the end of the 
seventeenth century the fashion is completely 
reversed ; the pendulum has swung back ; now it 
is the literature inspired by the old classical 
models that is real, and handles actual himian 
interests, while Romantic literature has become 
remote, fictitious, artificial. This does not 
mean that the men of the later seventeenth 
century believed in the gods and Achilles, but 
not in the saints and Arthur. It means that 
classical literature was found best to imitate 
for its form. The greater classical writers had 
described the life of man, as they saw it, in 
direct and simple language, carefully ordered 
by art. After a long apprenticeship of trans- 
lation and imitation, modern writers adopted 
the old forms, and filled them with modern 
matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, 
was used allegorically and allusively. Com- 
mon-sense, pointedly expressed, with some 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 27 

traditional ornament and fable, became the 
matter of poetiy. 

A rough summary of this kind is enough to 
show how large a question is involved in the 
history of Romance. All literary history is a 
long record of the struggle between those two 
rival teachers of man — books, and the exper- 
ience of life. Good books describe the world, 
and teach whole generations to interpret the 
world. Because they throw light on the life of 
man, they enjoy a vast esteem, and are set up 
in a position of authority. Then they generate 
other books; and literature, receding further 
and further from the source of truth, becomes 
bookish and conventional, until those who have 
been taught to see nature through the spec- 
tacles of books grow imeasy, and throw away 
the distorting glasses, to look at nature afresh 
with the naked eye. They also write books, it 
may be, and attract a crowd of imitators, who 
produce a literature no less servile than the 
literature it supplants. 

This movement of the sincere and indepen- 
dent human mind is found in the great writers 
of all periods, and is called the Return to Na- 



28 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

ture. It is seen in Pope no less than in Words- 
worth; in The Rape of the Lock no less than 
in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the 
mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boi- 
leau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that 
kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature 
against the stilted conventions of the late liter- 
ary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel. 
What do men really quarrel about? Is there 
any more distinctive mark of human quarrels 
than the eternal triviality of the immediate 
cause? The insulting removal of a memorial 
emblem from an Italian city; the shifting of 
£i reading-desk from one position to another in 
a French church ; the playful theft of a lock of 
hair by an amorous young English nobleman 
— these were enough, in point of fact, to set 
whole communities by the ears, and these are 
the events celebrated in The Rape of the 
Bucket, The Rape of the Lectern, The Rape of 
the Lock. How foolish it is to suppose that 
nature and truth are to be found in one school 
of poetry to the exclusion of another! The 
eternal virtues of literature are sincerity, clar- 
ity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They are to 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 29 

be found, in diverse combinations, now here 
and now there. While the late Latin Christian 
poets were bound over to Latin models — to 
elegant reminiscences of a faded mythology 
and the tricks of a professional rhetoric — there 
arose a new school, intent on making literature 
real and modern. These were the Romance 
poets. If they pictured Theseus as a duke, and 
Jason as a wandering knight, it was because 
they thought of them as live men, and took 
means to make them live for the reader or 
listener. The realism of the early literature of 
the Middle Ages is perhaps best seen in old 
Irish. The monk bewails the lawlessness of his 
wandering thoughts, which run after dreams of 
heauty and pleasure during the hour of divine 
service. The hermit in the wood describes, with 
loving minuteness, the contents of his larder. 
Never was there a fresher or more spontaneous 
poetry than the poetry of this early Christian 
people. But it is not in the direct line of de- 
scent, for it was written in the Celtic speech of 
a people who did not achieve the government of 
Europe. The French romances inherited the 
throne, and passed through all the stages of 



30 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

elaboration and decadence. They too, in their 
turn, became a professional rhetoric, false and 
tedious. When they ceased to be a true pic- 
ture of life, they continued in esteem as a school 
of manners and deportment for the fantastic 
gallantry of a court. Yet through them all 
their Christian origin shines. Their very 
themes bear witness to the teaching of Chris- 
tian asceticism and Christian idealism. The 
quest of a lady never seen ; the temptations that 
present themselves to a wandering knight 
under the disguise of beauty and ease ; — -these, 
and many other familiar romantic plots bor- 
row their inspiration from the same source. 
Not a few of the old fairy stories, preserved in 
folk-lore, are full of religious meaning — they 
are the Christian literature of the Dark Ages. 
Nor is it hard to discern the Christian origins 
of later Romantic poetry. Pope's morality has 
little enough of the religious character : 

Know then this truth (enough for Man to know), 
Virtue alone is Happiness below. 

But Coleridge, when he moralizes, speaks the 
language of Christianity: 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 31 

He prayeth best, who loveth best 
All things both great and small; 

For the dear God who loveth us 
He made and loveth all. 

The like contrast holds between Dryden 
and Shelley. It is perhaps hardly fair to take 
an example from Dryden's poems on religion; 
they are rational arguments on difficult topics, 
after this fashion : 

In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way 
To learn what unsuspected ancients say ; 
For 'tis not likely we should higher soar 
In search of heaven than all the church before. 

When Dryden writes in his most fervent and 
magnificent style, he writes like this : 

I will not rake the Dunghill of thy Crimes, 

For who would read thy Life that reads thy rhymes? 

But of King David's Foes be this the Doom, 

May all be like the Young-man Absalom; 

And for my Foes may this their Blessing be, 

To talk like Doeg and to write like Thee. 

Nor is it fair to bring Shelley's lame satires 
into comparison with these splendors. When 
Shelley is inspired by his demon, this is how he 
writes : 



32 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; 
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; 

To defy Power which seems omnipotent; 
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates 
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; 

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; 
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be 
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; 
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. 

Some of the great poets of the Romantic 
Revival took mediaeval literature for their 
model, but they did more than that. They re- 
turned to the cult of wild nature; they rein- 
troduced the supernatural, which is a part of 
the nature of man; they described seas, and 
deserts, and mountains, and the emotions of the 
soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out 
of the hands of the greater poets, this revived 
Romance became as bookish as decadent Clas- 
sicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental 
extravagance. Indeed revived Romance also 
became a school of manners, and by making a 
fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased 
the descriptive parts of the language. A de- 
scription by any professional reporter of any 
Royal wedding is further from the truth to-day 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 33 

than it was in the eighteenth century. The 
average writer is looser and more unprincipled. 
The word Romance supplies no very valu- 
able instrument of criticism even in regard to 
the great writers of the early nineteenth cen- 
tury. Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight 
from the life. Those who will may call him a 
Romantic. He told of adventures — ^the ad- 
ventures of the mind. He did not write of 
Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he 
concern himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the 
Lady of the Lake. He shunned what is de- 
rived from other books. His theme is man, 
nature, and human life. Scott, in rich and care- 
less fashion, dealt in every kind of material that 
came his way. He described his own country 
and his own people with loving care, and he 
loved also the melodrama of historical fiction 
and supernatural legend. "His romance and 
antiquarianism," says Ruskin, "his knighthood 
and monkery, are all false, and he knows them 
to be false." Certainly, The Heart of Midlo- 
thian and The Antiquary are better than 
Ivanhoe. Scott's love for the knighthood and 
monkery was real, but it was playful. His 
heart was with Fielding. 



34 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

There is nothing inconsistent in the best of 
the traditions of the two j^arties. The Classical 
school taught simplicity, directness, and mod- 
esty of speech. They are right : it is the way to 
tell a ghost story. The Romantic school taught 
a wider imaginative outlook and a more curious 
analysis of the human mind. They also are 
right: it is the way to investigate a case in the 
police courts. Both were cumbered, at times, 
with the dead things that they found in the 
books they loved. All literature, except the 
strongest and purest, is cumbered with useless 
matter — the conventional epithet, the grandi- 
ose phrase, the out-worn classical quotation, 
the self-conscious apology, the time-honored 
joke. But there are only two schools of lit- 
erature — the good, and the bad. As for na- 
tional legend, its growth is the same in all ages. 
The Greeks told tales of Achilles, the Romans 
of Aeneas, the French of Charlemagne, the 
British of Arthur. It is a part of the 
same process, and an expression of the same 
humanity. 

I have tried to show that the Renaissance 
bears the same relation to classical literature as 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 35 

the Revival of Romance bears to mediaeval 
literature, and that the whole history of the 
literature of Europe is an oscillation between 
Christian and Pagan ideals during that long 
and wavering process whereby Christianity was 
partially established as the creed and way of 
life of a group of diverse nations. The his- 
torical meaning of the word Romance is exact 
and easy to define. But in common usage the 
word means something much vaguer than this. 
It is a note, an atmosphere, a kind of feeling 
that is awakened not only by literature but by 
the behavior of men and the disposition of 
material objects. John Evelyn, the diarist, 
enjoys the reputation of having been the first 
to speak of a "romantic site," — a phrase which 
leads the way to immeasurable possibilities in 
the application of the word. Accuracy in the 
definition of this larger meaning is unattain- 
able ; and would certainly be false, for the word 
has taken its meaning from centuries of usage 
by inaccurate thinkers. A whole cluster of 
feelings, impressions, and desires, dimly recog- 
nized as cognate, has grown around the word, 
which has now been a centre of critical discus- 



36 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

sion and controversy for the better part of a 
century. Heine, in his dissertation on the Ro- 
mantic School, takes the Christianity of the 
Middle Ages as his starting-point, and relates 
everything to that. Perhaps he makes too 
much of allegory and symbolism, which have 
always been dear to the church, but are not 
conspicuous in early Romance. Yet no one can 
go far astray who keeps in touch, as Heine 
does, with the facts of history. Goethe, impa- 
tient of the wistful intensities of youth, said 
that the Classical is health, and the Romantic 
disease. Much has been made, by many critics, 
of the statue and the picture, as types of an- 
cient and modern art, the one complete in itself, 
the other suggesting more than it portrays. 
Mr. Walter Pater, borrowing a hint from a 
sentence of Bacon, finds the essence of Ro- 
mance in the addition of strangeness to beauty, 
of curiosity to desire. It would be easy to mul- 
tiply these epigrammatic statements, which are 
all not obscurely related to the fundamental 
changes wrought on the world by Christian 
ideas. No single formula can hope to describe 
and distinguish two eras, or define two tempers 



^ THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 37 

of mind. If I had to choose a single character- 
istic of Romance as the most noteworthy, I 
think I should choose Distance, and should call 
Romance the magic of Distance. What is the 
most romantic line in Virgil? Surely it is the 
line which describes the ghosts, staying for 
waftage on the banks of the river, and stretch- 
ing out their hands in passionate desire to the 
further shore : 

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. 

Scott expounds the harmonizing power of 
distance in his Journal, where he describes the 
funeral of his friend Laidlaw's infant: 

I saw the poor child's funeral from a distance. Ah, 
that Distance! What a magician for conjuring up 
scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, 
reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, 
softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by 
the influence of the imagination. A Scottish wedding 
should be seen at a distance; the gay band of the 
dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of 
the spectators, — the glass held high, and the distant 
cheers as it is swallowed, should be only a sketch, 
not a finished Dutch picture, when it becomes brutal 
and boorish. Scotch psalmody, too, should be heard 
from a distance. The grunt and the snuffle, and the 
whine and the scream, should be all blended in that 



38 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

deep and distant sound, which rising and falling like 
the Eolian harp, may have some title to be called 
the praise of our Maker. Even so the distant funeral : 
the few mourners on horseback with their plaids 
wrapped around them — the father heading the pro- 
cession as they enter the river, and pointing out the 
ford by which his darling is to be carried on the last 
long road — not one of the subordinate figures in dis- 
cord with the general tone of the incident — seeming 
just accessories, and no more — this is affecting. 

The same idea is the subject of T. E. 
Brown's poem, The Schooner: 

Just mark that schooner westward far at sea — 

'Tis but an hour ago 
When she was lying hoggish at the quay. 

And men ran to and fro. 
And tugged, and stamped, and shoved, and pushed 

and swore, 
And ever and anon, with crapulous glee, 
Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore. 

And now, behold ! a shadow of repose 

Upon a line of gray. 
She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose — 

She sleeps, and dreams away, 
Soft blended in a unity of rest 

All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes, 
'Neath the broad benediction of the West. 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 39 

Shelley finds the suggestion of distance in 
beautiful music: 

Though the sound overpowers, 
Sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing 
A tone 
Of some world far from ours. 
Where music and moonlight and feeling 
Are one. 

Wordsworth hears it in the song of the 
Highland Girl: 

Will no one tell me what she sings ? — 
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
For old, unhappy, far-off things. 
And battles long ago. 

These quotations are enough to show what 
a width of view is given to modern Romantic 
poetry. Man is, in one sense, more truly seen 
in a wide setting of the mountains and the sea 
than close at hand in the street. But the ro- 
mantic effect of distance may delude and con- 
ceal as well as glorify and liberate. The 
weakness of the modern Romantic poet is that 
he must keep himself aloof from life, that he 
may see it. He rejects the authority, and 
many of the pleasures, along with the duties, of 
society. He looks out from his window on the 



40 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

men fighting in the plain, and sees them trans- 
figured mider the rays of the setting sun. He 
enjoys the battle, but not as the fighters enjoy 
it. He nurses himself in all the luxury of 
philosophic sensation. He does not help to 
bury the child, or to navigate the schooner, or 
to discover the Fortunate Islands. The busi- 
ness of every poet, it may be said, is vision, not 
action. But the epic poet holds his reader fast 
by strong moral bonds of sympathy with the 
actors in the poem. "I should have liked to do 
that" is what the reader says to himself. He 
is asked to think and feel as a man, not as 
a god. 

The weakness of revived Romance found the 
most searching of its critics in Tennyson, who 
was fascinated, when he was shaping his own 
poetic career, by the picture and the past, yet 
could not feel satisfied with the purely aesthetic 
attitude of art to life. In poem after poem he 
returns to the question, Is poetry an escape 
from life? Must it lull the soul in a selfish se- 
curity? The struggle that went on in his mind 
has left its mark on The Lady of Shalott, The 
Palace of Art, The Voyage, The Vision of 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 41 

Sifij The Lotos-Eaters, and others of his 
poems. The Lady of Shalott Hves secluded in 
her bower, where she weaves a magic web with 
gay colors. She has heard that a curse will fall 
on her if she looks out on the world and down 
to the city of Camelot. She sees the outer 
world only in a mirror, and 

In her web she still delights 
To weave the mirror's magic sights 

— villages, market-girls, knights riding two and 
two, funerals, or pairs of lovers wandering by. 
At last she grows half-sick of seeing the world 
only in shadows and reflections. Then a sud- 
den vivid experience breaks up this life of 
dream. Sir Lancelot rides past, in shining ar- 
mor, singing as he rides. She leaves her magic 
web and mirror, and looks upon the real 
world. 

Out flew the web and floated wide ; 
The mirror crack'd from side to side ; 
"The curse is come upon me," cried 
The Lady of Shalott. 

She goes into the world, and there she meets 
her death. The poem is not an allegory, but 
there is no mistaking the thought that gener- 



42 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 

ated it. The mirror and the web are the em- 
blems of Romantic art. The feehngs which stir 
the heart to action, which spring to meet the 
occasion or the object, are contrasted, in the 
poem, with the more pensive feehngs which are 
excited by the sight of the object in a mirror, 
and the suggestions of color and design which 
are to be transferred to the embroidery. The 
mirror is a true and subtle symbol. When 
Shakespeare treated the same problem, he 
made King Richard II, the most romantic- 
ally minded of all his kings, call for a mir- 
ror. ^ The thing that it is easiest for a man to 
see in a mirror is himself ; egotism in its many 
forms, self-pity, self-cultivation, self-esteem, 
dogs Romanticism like its shadow. The desire 
to be the spectator of your own life, to see your- 
self in all kinds of heroic and pathetic atti- 
tudes, is the motive-power of Romantic poetry 
in many of its later developments. Yet life 
must be arrested and falsified before the desire 
can be fulfilled. No one has ever seen himself 
in a mirror as he is seen by others. He cannot 
catch himself looking away, self-forgetful, in- 
tent on something outward; yet only when he 



THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 43 

is in these attitudes does his true character 
show itself in his face. Nor, if he could so see 
himself, would he be a witness of the truth. 
The sensation of drowning, or of leading an 
assault in war, is very unlike the sentiment 
which is aroused in the spectator of either of 
these adventures. Romanticism, in its decline, 
confuses the sentiment with the sensation, and 
covets the enjoyment of life on the easy terms 
of a by-stander. 

These faults and failings of late Romance 
are far enough removed from the simple hero- 
ism of the death of Roland in the pass of 
Roncesvalles. Later Romance is known every- 
where by its derivative, secondary, consciously 
literary character. Yet it draws sometimes 
from the original source of inspiration, and 
attains, by devious ways, to poetic glories not 
inferior to the old. 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 

Romance is a perennial form of modern 
literature, and has passed through many- 
phases. No period has been without it, though 
the esteem in which it is held has varied a good 
deal from age to age. English literature is 
strong in romance; there is something in the 
English temper which makes scepticism un- 
grateful to it, and disposes it to treat even 
dreams seriously. Chaucer, who laughed at 
the romantic writers of his day, yet gave a 
new lease of life to Romance in Troilus and 
Cressida and The Knightes Tale. Many of the 
poets of the seventeenth century chose roman- 
tic themes for their most serious work; if 
Davenant and Chamberlayne and others had 
been as successful as they were ambitious, they 
would have anticipated the Revival of Ro- 
mance. Even in the age of Pope, the old 
romance subjects were still popular, though 

44 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 45 

they were celebrated in books which have long 
been forgotten. Everyone who has studied the 
Troy legend of the Middle Ages knows how 
great a share in the popularization of the 
legend belongs to the Sicilian lawyer, Guido 
delle Colonne, who summarized, in the dull 
style of a Latin chronicle, and without ac- 
knowledgment, the brilliant Roman de Troie 
which the French poet, Benoit de Sainte-More 
had written for Queen Eleanor of England. 
Guido's matter-of-fact compilation had an 
enormous vogue; Chaucer, Lydgate, and 
Shakespeare treated it as an authority; and 
Caxton translated it into English prose. 
Through all the changes of fashion Caxton's 
version continued in esteem; it was repeatedly 
revised and reissued; and, in the very age of 
Pope, found what was doubtless a large pub- 
lic under the title The Destruction of Troy, In 
Three Books . . . With many Admirable 
Acts of Chivalry and Martial Prowess, effected 
by Valiant Knights, in the Defence and hove 
of distressed Ladies. The Thirteenth Edition, 
Corrected and much Amended. London, 
Printed for Eben. Tracey, at the Three Bibles 



46 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

on London-Bridge. 1708. In the underworld 
of literature Romance never died out. The Re- 
vival of Romance took its special character 
from a gradual and powerful reaction against 
Dryden and Pope and all those masters of 
Classical method who, during half a century, 
had legislated for English poetry. It began 
very early in the eighteenth century, long be- 
fore the death of Pope. No sooner did a dy- 
nasty of moralists and satirists claim possession 
of the high places, and speak in the name of 
English literature, than all the other interests 
and kinds, which survived among the people, 
began to range themselves in opposition, and 
to assert their right to be heard. The suprem- 
acy of Dryden and Pope was the most despotic 
rule that English poetry has ever known, and 
the revolt was strong in proportion. Satire 
and morality very easily becomes tedious, espe- 
cially when they are in close alliance. Despot- 
ism may be tempered by epigrams, and so be- 
come tolerable, but it is important that the 
epigrams should not be made by the despot. 
Outside the charmed circle of his friendships, 
Pope was ready enough to use his wit against 
any pretender. 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 47 

The change began gradually, and in very in- 
nocent fashion. Poetry had been taught to be 
scholarly, self-conscious, experimental; and it 
showed its skill in half-playful imitations of the 
older English masters. Pope himself imitated 
Chaucer and Spenser in burlesque fashion. 
John Philips, in The Splendid Shilling, used 
Milton's heightened style to describe the dis- 
tresses of an impecunious poet. William Shen- 
stone in The School-mistress, parodied Spen- 
ser, yet the parody is in no way hostile, and 
betrays an almost sentimental admiration. 
Spenser, like Milton, never lost credit as a 
master, though his fame was obscured a little 
during the reign of Dryden. His style, it 
must be remembered, was archaic in his own 
time; it could not grow old, for it had never 
been young. Addison, in A71 Account of the 
Greatest English Poets, says that Spenser's 
verse 

Can charm an understanding age no more ; 
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
While the dull moral lies too plain below. 

But the Account is a merely juvenile work; 
its dogma is not the sword of judgment, but 



48 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

the shield of ignorance. "The character he 
gives of Spenser," said Pope, "is false; and I 
have heard him say that he never read Spenser 
till fifteen years after he wrote it." As for 
Pope himself, among the English poets Wal- 
ler, Spenser, and Dryden were his childhood's 
favorites, in that order; and the year before 
his death he said to Spence — "I don't know 
how it is; there is something in Spenser that 
pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it 
did in one's youth. I read the Faerie Queene, 
when I was about twelve, with infinite delight ; 
and I think it gave me as much when I read it 
over, about a j^ear or two ago." 

The lyrical Milton and the romantic Spen- 
ser found disciples among poets in the early 
half of the eighteenth century. Two of these 
disciples may be mentioned, both born about 
the year 1700, only twelve years later than 
Pope. John Dyer, the son of a solicitor in 
Wales, was bred to the law, but gave it up to 
study painting under Jonathan Richardson. 
His earlier and better poems were written 
while he wandered about South Wales in 
pursuit of his art. Grongar Hill, the most 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 49 

notable of them, was published in 1726. Love 
of the country is what inspires his verses, 
which have a very winning simplicity, only 
touched here and there by the conventions 
deemed proper for poetry; 

Grass and flowers Quiet treads, 
On the meads and mountain-heads, 
Along with Pleasure, close ally'd, 
Ever by each other's side; 
And often, by the murmuring rill, 
Hears the thrush, while all is still. 
Within the groves of Grongar Hill. 

The truth of his observation endeared him to 
Wordsworth; and his moral, when he finds a 
moral, is without violence : 

How close and small the hedges lie ! 
What streaks of meadows cross the eye ! 
A step methinks may pass the stream, 
So little distant dangers seem ; 
So we mistake the Future's face, 
Ey'd thro' Hope's deluding glass ; 
As yon summits soft and fair. 
Clad in colours of the air, 
Which, to those who journey near, 
Barren, and brown, and rough appear. 
Still we tread tir'd the same coarse way. 
The present's still a cloudy day. 



50 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, 
with no indecision, in the opening hnes of his 
poem, as Dyer does in TJie Country Walk: 

I am resolv'd, this charming day, 
In the open fields to stray ; 
And have no roof above my head 
But that whereon the Gods do tread. 

His landscapes are delicately etched, and are 
loved for their own sake : 

And there behold a bloomy mead, 
A silver stream, a willow shade. 
Beneath the shade a fisher stand, 
Who, with the angle in his hand, 
Swings the nibbling fry to land. 

It would be absurd to speak solemnly of 
Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an original poet; 
but the writer of the lines quoted above can 
never have been blind to the beauties of 
U Allegro and II Penseroso. His two arts 
brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 
he took orders in the Church of England, and 
in his later years did harm to his fame by a 
long industrial poem called The Fleece, which 
has on it none of the dew that glistens on his 
youthful verses. 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 51 

James Thomson, who won a great reputa- 
tion in his own age, was the son of a parish 
minister in Scotland, He was educated in 
Edinburgh, and came to London to seek his 
fortune. All Thomson's work shows the new 
tendencies in poetry struggling with the ac- 
cepted fashions. His language in The Sea- 
sons is habitually rhetorical and stilted, yet 
there is hardly a page without its vignettes of 
truth and beauty. When he forgets what he 
has learned in the Rhetoric class, and falls back 
on his own memories and likings, the poet in 
him reappears. In The Castle of Indolence, 
published just before his death in 1748, he imi- 
tates Spenser. One stanza of this poem is 
more famous than all the rest; it is pure and 
high romance: 

As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles, 
Placed far amid the melancholy main, 
(Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, 
Or that aerial beings sometimes deign 
To stand embodied to our senses plain), 
Sees on the naked hill, or valley low. 
The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, 
A vast assembly moving to and fro ; 
Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show. 



52 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

Many who are familiar with this simile have 
never been at the pains to remember, or en- 
quire, what it illustrates. Indeed its appear- 
ance in the poem is almost startling, as if it 
were there for no purpose but to prophesy of 
the coming glories of English poetiy. The 
visitors to the Castle of Indolence are met at 
the gate by the porter, who supplies them 
with dressing-gowns and slippers, wherein to 
take their ease. They then stroll off to various 
parts of the spacious grounds, and their dis- 
appearance is the occasion for this wonderful 
verse. Thomson cared no more than his read- 
ers for the application of the figure ; what pos- 
sessed him was his memory of the magic twi- 
light on the west coast of Scotland. 

Pope and Prior were metropolitan poets; it 
is worth noting that Dyer belonged to Wales, 
and Thomson to Scotland. It is even more sig- 
nificant that Dyer was by profession a painter, 
and that Thomson's poems were influenced by 
memories of the fashionable school of land- 
scape painting. The development of Romantic 
poetry in the eighteenth century is inseparably 
associated with pictorial art, and especially with 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 53 

the rise of landscape painting. Two great mas- 
ters of the seventeenth century, Salvator Rosa 
and Claude Lorrain, are more important than 
all the rest. We have here to do not with the ab- 
solute merits of painting, nor with its technical 
beauties and subtleties, but with its effect on 
the popular imagination, which in this matter 
does not much differ from the poetic imagina- 
tion. The landscapes of Salvator Rosa and 
Claude were made familiar to an enormous 
public by the process of engraving, and poetry 
followed where painting led. There are ex- 
quisite landscapes in the backgrounds of the 
great Italian masters; Leonardo, Titian, and 
others; but now the background became the 
picture, and the groups of figures were reduced 
to serve as incidents in a wider scheme. Ex- 
actly the same change, the same shift of the 
centre of interest, maj^ be seen in Thomson's 
poetry compared with Spenser's. No doubt 
it would be difficult to balance the creditor and 
debtor account as between poetry and paint- 
ing; the earlier pictorial landscapes borrowed 
some hints from the older romances; but in 
England, at least, landscapes of wild rocks. 



54 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

and calm lakes, and feudal castles lit up by 
the glow of the setting sun were familiar before 
the reaction in poetry set in. Romance, in its 
modern development, is largely a question of 
background. A romantic love-affair might be 
defined as a love-affair in other than domestic 
surroundings. Who can use the word "ro- 
mantic" with more authority than Coleridge? 
In Kubla Khan, a poem which some would 
choose as the high-water mark of English ro- 
mantic poetry, he gets his effect from the 
description of a landscape combining the ex- 
tremes of beauty and terror: 

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover ! 

A savage place ! as holy and enchanted 

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 

By woman wailing for her demon lover ! 

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, 

It flung up momently the sacred river. 
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, 
Then reached the caverns measureless to man, 
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean ; 
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 
Ancestral voices prophesying war! 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 55 

Romance demands scenery ; and it should never 
be forgotten that the age of Pope, the age 
of symmetry and correctness in poetry, was 
an age when the taste for wild scenery in 
painting and in gardening was at its height 
If the house was set in order, the garden 
broke into a wilderness. Addison in the Spec- 
tator (No. 414) praises the new art of land- 
scape gardening: 

There is generally in nature something more grand 
and august, than what we meet with in the curiosities 
of art. When, therefore, we see this imitated in any 
measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind 
of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and 
more accurate productions of art. On this account 
our English gardens are not so entertaining to the 
fancy as those in France and Italy, where we see 
a larger extent of ground covered over with an 
agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which rep- 
resent everywhere an artificial wildness, much more 
charming than that neatness and elegancy which we 
meet with in those of our own country. 

Addison would have hesitated to apply this 
doctrine to poetry; indeed the orthodoxy of 
that age favored the highest possible contrast 
between the orderly works of man, and the gar- 



56 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

den, which it chose to treat as the outpost of 
rebelhous nature. Pope was a gardener as 
well as a poet, and his gardening was extrava- 
gantly romantic. He describes his ideal gar- 
den in the Epistle to the Earl of Burlington: 

Let not each beauty everywhere be spy'd, 

Where half the skill is decently to hide. 

He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds. 

Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds. 

Consult the genius of the place in all ; 

That tells the waters or to rise, or fall ; 

Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale, 

Or scoops in circling theatres the vale ; 

Calls in the country, catches opening glades, 

Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades ; 

Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines ; 

Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. 

Pope carried out these ideas as well as he could 
in his garden at Twickenham, where he at- 
tempted to compress every variety of scenic 
effect within the space of five acres, so that it 
became a kind of melodramatic peep-show. 
The professional landscape-gardeners worked 
on a larger scale ; the two chief of them perhaps 
were Bridgeman, who invented the haha for 
tlie purpose of concealing the bounds; and Wil- 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 57 

liam Kent, Pope's associate and contemporary, 
who disarranged old gardens, and designed 
illustrations for Spenser's Faerie Queene. 
Kent was an architect and bad painter, much 
favored by George I. Lord Chesterfield com- 
pares him to Apelles, who alone was permitted 
to paint the portrait of Alexander: 

Equal your varied wonders ! save 

This difference we see, 
One would no other painter have — 

No other would have thee. 

From 1716 onward he was much employed 
by the Earl of Burlington. He helped to lay 
out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh 
and surprising view at every turn ; the wander- 
ing visitor was introduced, among other de- 
lights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, 
tlie Egyptian pyramid, St. Augustine's cave 
(artfully constructed of roots and moss), the 
Saxon Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and 
Dido's cave. The craze for romantic garden- 
ing, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins 
and groves, persisted throughout the eighteenth 
century. Shenstone's garden at The Leasowes 
enjoyed a higher reputation even than his 



58 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

poetry, and it is well known how he strained 
his slender means in the effort to outshine his 
neighbors. "In time," says Jolinson, "his ex- 
penses brought clamours about him that over- 
powered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; 
and his groves were haunted by beings very 
different from fauns and fairies." 

The chief of Kent's successors was Launce- 
lot Brown, commonly called "Capability 
Brown" from his habit of murmuring to him- 
self, as he gazed on a tract of land submitted 
for his diagnosis — ^"It has capabilities; it has 
capabilities." He laid out Kew and Blen- 
heim. Gazing one day on one of his own made 
rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist's rapture, — 
"Thames! Thames! Thou wilt never forgive 
me." He certainly imposed himself upon his 
own time, and, so far, was a great man. "Mr. 
Brown," said Richard Owen Cambridge, "I 
very earnestly wish that I may die before you." 
"Why so?" said Brown with some surprise. 
"Because," said he, "I should like to see 
Heaven before you had improved it." Among 
the romantic writers who were bitten by the 
mania for picturesque improvement were Hor- 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 59 

ace Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. 
Everyone knows how Walpole bought from 
Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little 
house called "Chopp'd Straw Hall" which he 
converted into the baronial splendors of Straw- 
berry Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean 
Tweedside farm, called Clarty Hole, into the 
less pretentious glories of Abbotsford. 

After the practice came the theory. The 
painters and landscape-gardeners were fol- 
lowed by a school of philosophers, who ex- 
pounded Taste and the laws of the Picturesque. 
'Some extracts from the work of one of these, 
Thomas Whately, whose Observations on 
Modern Gardening appeared in 1770, will 
show to what excesses the whole nonsensical 
business had been carried. "In wild and roman- 
tic scenes," says Whately, "may be introduced 
a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches 
may be still standing, and the loss of those 
which are fallen may be supplied by a few 
planks, with a rail, thrown over the vacancy. 
It is a picturesque object: it suits the situation; 
and the antiquity of the passage, the care taken 
to keep it still open, though the original build- 



60 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

ing is decayed, the apparent necessity which 
thence results for a communication, give it an 
imposing air of reahty.' The context of this 
passages shows that the bridge leads nowhither. 
On the management of rocks Wliately is a con- 
noisseur. "Their most distinguished charac- 
ters," he says, "are dignity, terror, and fancy: 
the expressions of all are constantly wild; and 
sometimes a rocky scene is only wild, without 
pretensions to any particular character." But 
ruins are what he likes best, and he recom- 
mends that they shall be constructed on the 
model of Tintern Abbey. They must be ob- 
vious ruins, much dilapidated, or the visitors 
will examine them too closely. "An appen- 
dage evidently more modern than the principal 
structure will sometimes corroborate the effect ; 
the shed of a cottager amidst the remains of a 
temple, is a contrast both to the former and the 
present state of the building." It seems almost 
impossible that this should have been offered 
as serious advice ; but it was the admired usage 
of the time. Whately's book was a recognized 
authority, and ran through several editions. 
He is also known as a Shakespeare critic, of no 
particular mark. 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 61 

A more influential writer than Whately was 
William Gilpin, an industrious clergyman and 
schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wander- 
ing and sketching in the most approved parts 
of England, Wales and Scotland. His books 
on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. 
The earliest of them was entitled Observations 
on the River Wye and several j^arts of South 
Wales .... relative chiefly to picturesque 
beauty (1782). Others, which followed in 
steady succession, rendered a like service to the 
Lake district, the Highlands of Scotland, the 
New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. Those 
books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild 
nature to a whole generation. It is a testimony 
to their influence that for a time they enslaved 
the youth of Wordsworth. In The Prelude he 
tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the 
teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but 
from the presumption which applied to the im- 
passioned life of Nature the "rules of mimic 
art." He calls this habit "a strong infection 
of the age," and tells how he too, for a time, 
was wont to compare scene with scene, and to 
pamper himself "with meagre novelties of 



62 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

colour and proportion." In another passage 
he speaks of similar melodi-amatic errors, from 
conformity to book-notions, in his early study 
of poetry. 

The dignities of plain occurrence then 

Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point, 

Where no sufficient pleasure could be found. 

But imaginative power, and the humility 
which had been his in childhood, returned to 
him — 

I shook the habit off 
Entirely and for ever. 

Yet in one curious respect Gilpin's amateur 
teaching did leave its mark on the history of 
English poetry. When Wordsworth and Col- 
eridge chose the Wye and Tintern Abbey for 
their walking tour, they were probably deter- 
mined in that direction by the fame of the 
scenery; and when they and Southey settled in 
the Lake district, it may be surmised that they 
felt other and stronger attractions than those 
that came from Wordsworth's early associa- 
tions with the place. The Wye, Tintern Ab- 
bey, the English Lakes, the Scottish High- 
lands — these were the favored places of the 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 63 

apostles of the picturesque, and have now be- 
come memorial places in our poetic history. 

All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who 
busied themselves with wild nature were aiming 
at an ideal which had been expressed in many- 
painted landscapes, and had been held up as 
the top of admiration by one of the greatest 
English poets. The influence of Milton on the 
new landscape interest must be held to be not 
less than the influence of his contemporaries, 
Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of 
Paradise did more than any painting to alter 
the whole practice of gardening. They are 
often appealed to, even by the technical gar- 
deners. In garden-lore Milton was a convinced 
Romantic. He has two descriptions of the 
Garden of Eden; the slighter of the two occurs 
on the occasion of Raphael's entry, and merely 
resumes the earlier and fuller account: 

Their glittering tents they passed, and now is come 
Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe, 
And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme ; 
A Wilderness of Sweets; for Nature here 
Wantoned as in her prime and plaid at will 
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet, 
Wilde above rule or art; enormous bliss. 



64 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

Coleridge has some remarks, in his Table 
Talkj on Milton's disregard of painting. There 
are only two pictures, he says, in Milton ; Adam 
bending over the sleeping Eve, and the en- 
trance of Dalilah, like a ship mider full sail. 
Certainly the above lines are no picture; but 
they are more exciting than any clear delinea- 
tion could be; they are full of scent, and air, 
and the emotions of ease and bliss. The other 
passage has more of architectural quality in it, 
and describes what first met Satan's gaze, when 
he entered the Garden and sat, perched like a 
cormorant, upon the Tree of Life. 

The crisped Brooks 
With mazie error under pendant shades 
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed 
Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art 
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon 
Poured forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine 
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote 
The open field, and where the unpierc't shade 
Imbround the noontide Bowers : Thus was this place, 
A happy rural seat of various view: 
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and 

Balme, 
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde 
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true, 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 65 

If true, here onely, and of delicious taste : 
Betwixt the Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks 
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd, 
Or palniie hilloc, or the flourie lap 
Of some irriguous Valley spread her store, 
Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose: 
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves 
Of coolc recess, o'er which the mantling Vine 
Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps 
Luxuriant ; mean while murmuring waters fall 
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake, 
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown'd. 
Her chrystall mirror holds, unite their streams. 
The Birds their quire apply ; aires, vernal aires, 
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune 
The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan 
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance 
Led on th' Eternal Spring. 

Here is all the variety of hill and valley, 
wood and lawn, rock and meadow, waterfall 
and lake, rose and vine, which the landscape 
artists also loved to depict, and which, together 
with ruined temples and castles, unknown in 
Paradise, became the cherished ideal of land- 
scape gardening. By the influence of Paradise 
Lost upon the gardeners, no less than by the 
influence of U Allegro and II Penseroso upon 
the poets, Milton may claim to be regarded as 



66 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

one of the forefathers of the Romantic Revival. 
There is no need to distinguish carefully be- 
tween poetry and painting in discussing their 
contributions to Romance. A great outcry was 
raised, in the last age, against literary criticism 
of pictures. But in this question we are con- 
cerned with this effect of pictures on the nor- 
mal imagination, which is literary, which cares 
for story, and suggested action, and the whole 
chain of memories and desires that a picture 
may set in motion. Do not most of those who 
look at a romantic landscape imagine them- 
selves wandering among the scenes that are 
portrayed? And are not men prone to admire 
in Nature what they have been taught by Art 
to notice? The landscape art of the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries taught them to 
imagine themselves in lonely scenes, among old 
ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise 
or sunset, cast on gleaming lakes. These were 
the theatre of Romance; and the emotions 
awakened by scenes like these played an enor- 
mous part in the Revival. It was thus that 
poets were educated to find that exaltation 
in the terrors of mountainous regions which 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 6T 

Gray expressed when he said: "Not a preci- 
pice, not a torrent, not a chff, but is pregnant 
with rehgion and poetry." 

The weaker side of modern Romance, the 
play-acting and pretence that has always ac- 
companied it, may be seen in the gardening 
mania. It was not enough to be a country gen- 
tleman; the position must be improved by the 
added elegances of a hermit's cell and an 
Egyptian pyramid. It is like children's play; 
the day is long, the affairs of our elders are 
tedious, we are tired of a life in which there is 
no danger and no hunger; let us pretend that 
we are monks, or ancient Romans. The mature 
imagination interprets the facts; this kind of 
imagination escapes from the facts into a world 
of make-believe, where the tyranny and cause 
and effect is no longer felt. It is not a hard 
word to call it childish ; the imagination of these 
early Romantics had a child's weakness and a 
child's delightful confidence and zest. 

The same play activity expressed itself in lit- 
erature, where an orgy of imitation ushered in 
the real movement. The antiquarian begin- 
nings of Romantic poetry may be well illus- 



68 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

trated by the life and works of Thomas War- 
ton. He passed liis hfe as a resident Fellow 
of Trinity College, Oxford, and devoted his 
leisure, which was considerable, to the study of 
English poetry and Gothic architecture. He 
was not yet thirty when, in 1757, he was elected 
Professor of Poetry, a post which he held lor 
ten years. During this time he planned a com- 
plete History of English Poetry, a task which 
Pope and Gray in turn had contemplated and 
abandoned. The historical interest which is so 
conspicuous in early Romanticism owed not a 
little, it may be remarked in passing, to the 
initiative of Pope, who must therefore be given 
a place in any full genealogy of the Romantic 
family. Warton's History, so far as it was 
completed, was published between 1774 and 
1781, when he relaxed his efforts, and took up 
lesser tasks. In 1785 he was made Poet Lau- 
reate on the strength of his early poems and 
later scholarship. He died in 1790. 

Warton's poems are a curious study. Spen- 
ser and Milton are his masters, and he is a docile 
pupil. His poetry is all derivative, and might 
be best described as imitation poetry. Christo- 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 69 

pher North said of him that "the gods had 
made him poetical, but not a poet," a saying 
which contains the whole truth. He puts to- 
gether a mosaic of phrases borrowed from his 
teachers, and frames them in a sentimental 
setting of his own. Here are some passages 
from The Pleasures of Melancholy, which, 
though he wrote it at the age of seventeen, does 
not differ in method or inspiration from the 
rest of his poetical work : 

Beneath yon ruin'd abbey's moss-grown piles 

Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, 

Where thro' some western window the pale moon 

Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light; 

While sullen sacred silence reigns around. 

Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bow'r 

Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and damp, 

Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves 

Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green 

Invests some wasted tow'r. . . . 

Then, when the sullen shades of ev'ning close, 

Where thro' the room a blindly-glimm'ring gleam 

The dying embers scatter, far remote 

From Mirth's mad shouts, that thro' th' illumin'd 

roof 
Resound with festive echo, let me sit, 
Blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . . 
O come then. Melancholy, queen of thought ! 



70 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

O come with saintly look, and steadfast step, 
From forth thy cave embower'd with mournful yew, 
Where ever to the curfeu's solemn sound 
List'ning thou sitt'st, and with thy cypress bind 
Thy votary's hair, and seal him for thy son. 

Melancholy seems not to have answered these 
advances. In later life Warton was a short, 
squat, red-faced man, fond of ale, and a cheer- 
ful talker, with a thick utterance, so that he 
gobbled like a turkey-cock. Some of his verses 
are cheerful. This is from the Ode on the Ap- 
proach of Summer: 

Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand 

With thee lead a buxom band; 

Bring fantastic-footed Joy, 

With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy: 

Leisure, that through the balmy sky 

Chases a crimson butterfly. 

Bring Health, that loves in early dawn 

To meet the milk-maid on the lawn ; 

Bring Pleasure, rural nymph, and Peace, 

Meek, cottage-loving shepherdess ! 

It is all like this, fluent and unnecessary. Per- 
haps no verses in English were ever made so 
exactly in the approved fashion of modern 
Latin verses. Warton writes pleasantly, his 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 71 

cento of reminiscences is skilful, and his own 
epithets are sometimes happy, yet nothing 
comes of it. His work suggests the doubt 
whether any modern Latin verse, even the best, 
would deceive an intelligent citizen of ancient 
Rome. 

The strange thing about the Romantic Re- 
vival is that an epidemic of this sort of imita- 
tion at last produced real poetry and real ro- 
mance. The industrious simulation of the 
emotions begot the emotions simulated. Is 
there not a story told of a young officer who, 
having dressed himself in a sheet to frighten 
his fellows, was embarrassed by the company of 
a real ghost, bent on the same errand; and 
retired from the enterprise, leaving it wholly 
to the professional? That, at any rate, is 
very much what happened to the Romantic 
impersonators. 

Another parallel may perhaps be found in 
the power of vulgarity to advance civilization. 
Take, for instance, the question of manners. 
Politeness is a codification of the impulses of 
a heart that is moved by good will and consid- 
eration for others. If the impulses are not 



72 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

there, the poHteness is so far unreal and in- 
sincere — a cheap varnish. Yet it is insisted on 
by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. 
If the forms are taught, the soul of them may 
be, and sometimes is, breathed in later. So 
this imitative and timid artifice, this conform- 
ity to opinions the ground and meaning of 
which is not fully understood, becomes a great 
engine of social progress. Imitation and for- 
gery, which are a kind of literary vulgarity, 
were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. 
Some of the greater poets who passed this way 
went on to express things subtler and more 
profound than had found a voice in the poetry 
that they imitated. 

The long debate on the so-called poems of 
Ossian is now ended. Thej^ are known to be a 
not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. 
Yet their importance in literary history re- 
mains undiminished, and the life of Macpher- 
son has a curious kind of pathos. He was the 
creature and victim of the Romantic move- 
ment, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, 
into supplying fraudulent evidence for the fa- 
vorite Romantic theory that a truer and deeper 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 73 

vein of poetry is to be found among primitive 
peoples. Collins's Ode on the Popular Super- 
stitions of the Highlands of Scotland and 
Gray's Bard show the hterary world prepared 
to put itself to school to Celtic tradition. Mac- 
pherson supplied it with a body of poetry which 
exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial 
date in his history is his meeting in 1759 with 
John Home, the author of the once famous 
tragedy of Douglas. In the summer of that 
year Home was drinking the waters at Moffat, 
and among the visitors assembled there found 
Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, 
then a boy of ten, and his tutor, James Mac- 
pherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambi- 
tious, who had been educated at Aberdeen and 
Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home, 
full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized 
upon the opportunity to question Macpherson 
concerning the poems that were rumored to 
have survived among the Gaelic-speaking pop- 
ulation of Scotland. In the light of what we 
now know it is not difficult to understand the 
genesis of this great European fraud. Mac- 
pherson was proud of his race, which he had 



74 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

celebrated in an heroic poem called The High- 
lande7\ He had interested himself in Gaelic 
poetry, though his knowledge of the tongue 
was not good, and he had by him some frag- 
ments of genuine Gaelic poems. He was flat- 
tered by Home's appeal to him, and, feeling 
perhaps that the few and shght genuine poems 
which he could produce would hardly warrant 
the magnificence of his allusions to Gaelic lit- 
erature, he forged a tale in poetic prose, called 
The Death of Oscar, and presented it to Home 
as a translation from the Gaelic. The poem 
was much admired, and Macpherson, unable 
now to retrace his steps without declaring him- 
self a cheat, soon produced others from the 
same source. These were submitted to the lit- 
erary society of Edinburgh, with the great 
Dr. Blair at its head, and were pronounced to 
be the wonder of the world. From this point 
onward, during a long and melancholy life, 
poor Macpherson was enslaved to the fraud 
which had its beginning in the shyness and 
vanity of his own character. He was bound 
now to forge or to fail ; and no doubt the con- 
sciousness that it was his own work which 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 75 

called forth such rapturous applause sup- 
ported him in his labors and justified him to 
his own conscience. A subscription was easily 
raised in Edinburgh to enable him to travel 
and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For 
a few months he perambulated the western 
highlands and islands, and returned to Edin- 
burgh bringing with him Fingal, a complete 
epic poem in six books. This was followed by 
Temora^ in eight books, also attributed to the 
great Gaelic bard Ossian; and the new Celtic 
fashion was established. ^ 

These poems had an immense success. 
Everyone knows how they influenced the 
youth of Goethe, and captured the imagina- 
tion of Napoleon. It is less surprising that 
they enraptured the poet Gray, and were ap- 
proved by the professor Blair, for they were 
exactly modelled on the practice and theory 
of these two critics. All the fashionable doc- 
trine of that age concerning the history of 
poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry, 
so it was held, is to be found in its perfection 
only in primitive society, before it is overlaid 
by the complexities of modem civilization. Its 



76 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, 
is the epic; and Dr. Blair must have been de- 
lighted to find that the laws of the epic, which 
he so often explained to his class in Edin- 
burgh University, were minutely observed by 
the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without 
suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic 
poems had come partly from himself. 

The belief that Celtic literature is essentially 
and eternally melancholy, — a belief which per- 
sisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold, 
also drew its strength from the poems of Os- 
sian. Here again theory showed the way to 
practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic 
poems is not the melancholy of the Celt, but a 
melancholy compounded of many simples, and 
extracted from works that were held in high 
esteem in the eighteenth centuiy — Young's 
Night Thoughts, Blair's Grave, Gray's Bard, 
and the soliloquies of Milton's Satan. 

Macpherson was soon challenged, and his 
whole life was passed in a brawl of controversy. 
Two famous men dismissed him contemptu- 
ously. Dr. Johnson, who knew what honesty 
means among scholars, treated him as an impu- 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 77 

dent impostor. Wordsworth, who knew what 
simplicity means in poetry, declared that all 
the imagery of the poems is false and spurious. 
But the whole question early became a national 
quarrel, and the honor of Scotland was in- 
volved in it. There are signs that Macpherson 
would gladly have escaped from the storm he 
had raised. Aided by his early literary success, 
he became a prosperous man, held a well-paid 
post at court, entered Parliament, and was 
pensioned by the govermnent. Still the con- 
troversy persisted. He had found it easy to 
take up a haughty attitude towards those hos- 
tile critics who had doubted his good faith and 
had asked him to produce his Gaelic originals. 
But now the demand for the originals came 
from his champions and friends, who desired 
to place the fame of Scotland's oldest and 
greatest poet on a sure foundation. He wrig- 
gled on the hook, and more than once timidly 
hinted that the poems owed not a little to the 
poetic genius of the translator. But this half- 
hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a 
part of his fame stirred the Caledonian en- 
thusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last. 



78 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

when he was no longer able to restrain his sup- 
porters, the wretched Macpherson found no 
escape but one. In middle age, some twenty- 
years after his first appearance on the poetic 
horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and 
an imperfect knowledge of the Gaehc tongue, 
to forge the originals. In 1807, eleven years 
after his death, these were at last published. 
The progress of genuine Celtic scholarship 
during the succeeding century did the rest; 
and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and 
vapors which were the inspiration of his Muse.* 
The poems of Ossian are only one, though 
perhaps the most signal, instance of the for- 
geries which prevailed like an epidemic at the 
time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these, 
like Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, were little 
better than cold-blooded mercenary frauds. 
Others, like Chatterton's Rowley Poems and 
Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, are full 
of the zest and delight of play-acting. Even 
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner^ though it is free 
from the reproach of forgery, is touched by the 

* For some of the facts in this account of Ossian I am 
indebted to Mr. J. S. Smart's fascinating book, James Mac- 
pherson, an Episode in Literature (David Nutt, 1905). 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 79 

same spirit. The severe morality of scholar- 
ship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or 
modern matter. Scholars are the trustees of 
poets; but where this trust is undertaken by 
men who are poets themselves, there is usually 
a good deal of gaiety and exuberance in its 
performance. 

I have now traced some of the neglected 
sources of revived Romance, and have shown 
how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, 
than in any other great movement in literature, 
it was not the supply which created the de- 
mand, but the demand which created the 
supply. The Romantic change was wrought, 
not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a 
shift in public taste. Readers of poetry knew 
what it was they wanted, even before they 
knew whether it existed. Writers were soon 
at hand to prove that it had existed in the past, 
and could still be made. The weakness of 
vague desire is felt everywhere in the origins 
of the change. Out of the weakness came 
strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole 
was enlarged to house the magnanimous soul 
of Scott ; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth to 
FaiLst. 



80 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

The weakness of the Romantic movement, 
its love of mere sensation and sentiment, is 
well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and 
strong mind of Keats. He was a pupil of 
the Romantics; and poetry, as he first con- 
ceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless 
fields of passive enjoyment. His early work 
shows the struggle between the delicious swoon 
of reverie and the growing pains of thought. 
His verse, in its beginnings, was crowded with 
"luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy." He 
was a boy at the time of England's greatest 
naval glory, but he thinks more of Robin 
Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could 
revisit the forest, says Keats, 

He would swear, for all his oaks 
Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes. 
Have rotted on the briny seas. 

His use of a word like "rich," as Mr. Robert 
Bridges has remarked, is almost inhuman in 
its luxurious detachment from the human 
situation. 

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 
To cease upon the midnight with no pain. 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 81 

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, 
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave. 

By his work in this kind Keats became the 
parent and founder of the Aesthetic School of 
poetry, which is more than half in love with 
easeful death, and seeks nothing so ardently as 
rest and escape from the world. The epilogue 
to the Aesthetic movement was written by Wil- 
liam Morris before ever he broke out from 
those enchanted bowers : 

So with this earthly paradise it is. 
If ye will read aright, and pardon me 
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss 
Midmost the beating of the steely sea. 
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be, 

Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay, 

Not the poor singer of an empty day. 

Yet there is another side to the work of 
Keats, more wonderful in its broken promise 
than all the soft perfections of his tender 
Muse. He grew tired of imitation and ease. 
Weakness may exclude the world by forget- 
ting it; only strength can conquer the world. 
What if this law be also the law of beauty? 
The thought inspires his last great attempt. 



82 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

the fragment of Hyperion. Men have their 
dynasties and revolutions; but the immortals 
also, whom men worship, must change to live. 

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
A power more strong in beauty. 

And this power cannot be won by those who 
shirk the challenge of ugly facts. 

O folly ! for to bear all naked truths, 
And to envisage circumstance, all calm, 
That is the top of sovereignty. 

As if to enforce his thought by repetition, 
Keats made an allegorical framework for his 
revised version of the poem. There he exhibits 
himself as wandering among the delights of the 
garden of this life, and indulging himself to 
the point of drunkenness. Awaked from his 
swoon, he finds himself at the steps of the 
temple of fame. He is told he must climb or 
die. After an agony of struggle he mounts to 
the top, and has speech there with a veiled fig- 
ure, who tells him that this temple is all that 
has been spared in the war between the rival 
houses of the Gods, When he asks why he 



IMITATION AND FORGERY 83 

has been saved from death, the veiled figure 
makes reply: 

"None can usurp this height," return'd that shade, 
"But those to whom the miseries of the world 
Are misery, and will not let them rest." 

"Are there not thousands in the world," said I, 
Encourag'd by the sooth voice of the shade, 

"Who love their fellows even to the death, 
Who feel the giant agony of the world. 
And more, like slaves to poor humanity. 
Labour for mortal good? I sure should see 
Other men here, but I am here alone." 

"Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," 
Rejoined that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; 
They seek no wonder but the human face. 
No music but a happy-noted voice : 
They come not here, they have no thought to come ; 
And thou art here, for thou art less than they. 
What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, 
To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, 
A fever of thyself: think of the earth; 
What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? 
What haven? every creature hath its home. 
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, 
Whether his labours be sublime or low — 
The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: 
Only the dreamer venoms all his days, 
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve." 



84 IMITATION AND FORGERY 

In this, wliich is almost his last deliberate 
utterance, Keats expresses his sense of the fu- 
tility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry 
itself. A condemnation of the expression of 
profound thought in beautiful forms would 
come very ill from Keats, but this much he 
surely had learned, that poetry, the real high 
poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The 
worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline 
them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their 
comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand se- 
vere discipline, and emerge the purer and 
stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins 
of flatness and prosiness the Classical School 
has always taught discipline. No doubt it has 
sometimes trusted too absolutely to discipline, 
and has given us too much of the foot-rule and 
the tuning-fork. But one discipline, at least, 
poetry cannot afford to neglect — the discipline 
of facts and life. The poetry that can face this 
ordeal and survive it is rare. Some poets are 
tempted to avoid the experience and save the 
dream. Others, who were poets in their 
youth, undergo the experience and are beaten 
by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked 
truth and still keep its singing voice is the only 
immortal poetry. 




013 519 096 2 # 



